


The Victory Is

by Aidara



Category: Southland
Genre: Character of Color, Female Characters, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-17
Updated: 2010-12-17
Packaged: 2017-10-13 17:59:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/140110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aidara/pseuds/Aidara
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They could say what they wanted, but she’d learned the hard way not to listen.</p><p>The women of Southland on the job.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Victory Is

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Zara Hemla (zarahemla)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/zarahemla/gifts).



> Set sometime in Season 1. Possible triggers: mentions of rape, brief descriptions of violence. Basically, if the show doesn’t trigger you, I doubt this fic will.
> 
> Disclaimer: I know only as much about how the police system works as can be gleaned from watching the show. Probably even less than that. So I’m sure there are gaping holes in the realism here.

Chickie slammed the perp against the brick, scraping a couple of knuckles in the process, and wondered -- not for the first time that day -- where the _fuck_ Dewey was.

The last she’d heard from him was that he was “on that motherfucker.” These days, that meant less “pursuing the suspect” and more “wheezing and limping ineffectually in the general direction of the suspect.” But since they’d walked in on both of these assholes in the middle of gang-raping a teenage girl, Chickie had figured any small (tiny, minuscule) chance of Dewey catching the other one was better than no chance at all.

It only took a split second of looking around for the idiot for her own perp to Houdini an arm out of her grasp and reach it around to the back of her head. She stiffened her neck, anticipating a tug. Instead she felt fingers scrabbling around in the bun at the nape of her neck. What the… Was he trying to… Yes, he was. He was trying to take out her bobby pins.

“Son of a _bitch_.” And rarely was it more satisfying to knee a guy in the balls than when that guy was a perv. And wearing only hastily pulled-on boxer briefs. This time she cuffed him before he could try anything else disgusting.

“I almost had the bastard. Lost him when he jumped a wall. Fuckin’ circus monkey.” Dewey came puffing up the sidewalk like the little substance abuser that could (or couldn’t), predictably empty-handed. “Oh cool, you got him.”

“Yeah, Dewey, I got him.” Chickie shoved the dude in the car, looked to make sure the other patrol was comforting the victim and giving her the standard “call us if you need us” drill, and went to report their incoming 10-15.

“Hey, your hair’s messed up, you might wanna fix that.”

Chickie slammed the radio back in the cradle and stood up out of the car to whirl on him. “Are you serious right now? You know what, Dewey? Shut the fuck up.”

“Whoa, sorry, sweetness!” Dewey raised his hands like she’d pointed a gun at him. “You usually don’t care about your hair, how was I supposed to know you’d be all hormonal about it?”

“Just get in the car, okay?” Chickie pointedly slid into the driver’s seat. “And report your damn suspect.”

She’d been asked sometimes, mostly by guys, why she didn’t just cut her hair. She could wrangle it up into a bun in about thirty seconds flat by now, but they all acted like it must be some huge burden. She always told them the same thing: “Because I don’t want to.”

 

“Be advised, suspect at large, 261 with possible 217, last known location Oxnard and Willowcrest.”

Lydia registered the rape call filtering out of an office to her right with half an ear. When you had a catalogue of criminals in your head already, there was no need to add a superfluous one.

And what joy, there were a few more waiting for her in case files when she got to her desk. She sighed. Nothing like starting the week off right.

“What’s the matter, Adams? Don’t like the smell of fresh crime in the morning?” Fernandez raised an eyebrow as she personally dropped another file in Lydia’s inbox.

“Oh, you know. Just Monday.” Lydia picked up the pile and flipped through it. Which brutal slaying did she feel like dealing with first? The forty-five-year-old housewife who was found with her left index finger lodged in her throat, the sixteen-year-old prostitute with three times the lethal dose of cocaine in her system, or the sloppiest attempt at making it look like a suicide Lydia had ever seen, the mistress with the knife wound in the middle of her back?

“You might want to start with the girl from the hills.” Apparently Fernandez was a mind reader now.

“What, the one we just closed? I thought we had a confession.”

“We did. And yesterday, the guy confessed to a few more, including Jimmy Hoffa, the Black Dahlia, and Cleopatra. He’s going in for a psych eval. In the meantime, you might wanna keep looking. And by the way, Clarke is out sick today.”

Well, didn’t that just put the cherry on her sundae. “That’s just fantastic, boss, thank you.” Lydia pinched the bridge of her nose and fantasized about a giant latte with four shots of espresso.

Folger’s slop from the break room it was. Three cups later, Rogers poked his head over the cubicle wall in front of her. “Hey Lydia, you dating anyone right now?”

“Why would I do a thing like that?” She squinted at her computer screen. Were her eyes getting bad? She couldn’t need glasses already, she was only thirty-eight.

“You kidding me? All due respect, you’re hot. I got a cousin who’s single.”

“Did you really just say that?” When she’d been on patrol, she might’ve wiped that stupid smirk off his face with physical force. Now she was adult enough to glare. It had pretty much the same effect. “Sit back down right now. I don’t want to date your nasty-ass cousin.”

Rogers subsided, shaking his head. Yeah, yeah, Lydia Adams, the frigid bitch. They could say what they wanted, but she’d learned the hard way not to listen. Every date eventually looked at her the same way, gave her the same familiar shiver of rejection, so why bother with that shit? Who needed love? Hell, most of the women that crossed her desk had been killed by their romantic partners. And who needed sex when you could come to work and get fucked by the system that was supposed to help them?

Speaking of which, looked like she’d have to make another visit to the lab, because Mrs. Julia Perkins of North Hollywood, the one with the finger in her throat, showed signs of having been raped. That narrowed down the suspect list, depressingly enough.

Several piles of police notes, fifteen crime scene photos, and three separate and completely contradictory witness statements later, she was no closer to finding a motive, let alone any suspects.

“Okay, cousin who is _so not_ nasty aside, wanna grab some lunch?”

Lydia snapped out of her case file funk to find that Rogers had crept up on her, dangling a key ring from one finger. She squinted up at him. “Did you know that about three quarters of all rapes are committed by someone the victim knows?”

Rogers stopped jingling his keys. “I worry about you. You know what you need? A taco.”

Lydia regretted the immediate impulse to roll her eyes when it only exacerbated her headache. “Okay, let’s get tacos. Let me just put out an alert for a rapist.”

“Ah, the fun never ends.”

 

A group of them were eating lunch (or dinner, or breakfast, depending on shift) in the food court at Hollywood and Highland when the advisory crackled over all the radios. There was that familiar moment when everyone instinctively shut up to listen to it, and then chaos resumed.

“You and Dickhead have that beat today, don’t you?” Cooper asked her while stabbing at his chow mein ineffectively with a fork. Chickie barely refrained from telling him to twirl it properly. Living with a teenager got into your head.

“Yeah, joy of joys.”

“The question is,” Dewey chimed in, gesturing with his fork and flicking sweet and sour over the table, “how’re you gonna tell one rapist in Hollywood from all the others?”

“You could take your mom along, Dewey, see which ones she knows.” Harlow was sitting at the far end of the table, which was the only reason Dewey didn’t punch him immediately.

John, though, handily beaned him with a fortune cookie. “No rape jokes, idiot.”

John was like that, weirdly sensitive about certain issues and completely dismissive of others. Maybe he just picked his battles. God knew Chickie did.

“Well folks, back into the breach we go,” he announced to the group. Chickie and Sherman shot looks at each other like they did every time John did something like half-quote Shakespeare. “Hour twelve, here we come.”

“Aw, Cooper, you can take it,” Ramirez cooed across the table.

“Hey, do you know how much I need a shave right now? No, you don’t, because you’ve never had a cactus growing on your face.”

“Oh, man up, at least you’ve never had to carry a tampon in your utility belt.” She smirked and crunched on an eggroll.

“Touché, my friend. Touché.”

Two hours later, they got a callback to the address in North Hollywood where their rapist had made his great escape that morning.

“What the fuck, you think it’s the same guy?” Dewey’s sudden interest was probably less concern for the victim and more dread of another chase, but at least he was fucking _engaged_ for once.

Chickie shrugged as she made a U-turn. “You think he’d be dumb enough to show up twice in one day?”

Sure enough, they went in through the busted door to find Steve McQueen himself crawling out a window. There was a body on the floor. Chickie didn’t look, didn’t leave it to Dewey this time, just threw her whole weight into dragging the fucker back into the room by his knees.

“On the ground, right now,” she snarled into his ear, throwing him onto his stomach hard enough to knock the wind out of him, shoving a knee into the small of his back, and yanking his hands into the cuffs.

“Fuck,” Dewey muttered, staring at the girl. She wasn’t moving.

Chickie didn’t want to get off the guy, wanted him pinned until backup got there. She listened as Dewey reported a homicide.

 

It was 4:30, and Lydia had just spent ten minutes trying to decide between fast food and the leftover Lean Cuisine in her freezer for dinner (and then trying to figure out why she gave a shit if she gained weight) when her phone rang.

Twenty minutes later, she was staring at her first victim of the week. The fact that they’d caught the asshole responsible wasn’t much comfort, but sometimes that was all you had. Sometimes it was more than you had.

It was an open-and-shut case. Officer Brown’s report from that morning stated that Andrea Stevens hadn’t wanted to call any family or friends to stay with her and had refused any police protection or medical treatment. A neighbor saw suspect number two return to the scene just hours after he’d evaded custody but had waited too long to call the police. In the neighbor’s defense, it might not have taken very long. There was no evidence of rape this time. Apparently he’d only been interested in finishing the job.

“Suspect’s right index finger has been severed at the major knuckle,” Rogers said into the little voice recorder he liked to use.

“Check her throat,” Lydia said over her shoulder. There were pictures on the mantle, the usual smiling family photos, one of those overpriced shots taken on a roller coaster, a Golden Retriever. At least there were no kids. She wondered if this woman had known her killer, if that’s why she hadn’t wanted to call anyone. Not likely if this was a serial case, but possible. It was usually the ones people let in willingly that hurt them. Statistics showed. Had Andrea been ashamed? Afraid of retaliation? Both? They might never know.

“Severed finger lodged in oral cavity, partially entering pharynx…”


End file.
